Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Friday said he was ordering the “complete and immediate cancellation” of all Department of War attendants at universities like Princeton, Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brown and Yale, starting with the 2026-27 academic year.
Hegseth added that the ban would also include “many others,” claiming the higher education system has been “poisoned from within from a class of so-called elite universities who’ve abused their privilege and access to this department and utterly betrayed their purpose.”
Hegseth’s announcement comes after he similarly banned active-duty service members earlier this month from attending Harvard starting next year.
He accused the universities of gorging themselves for decades on a “trust fund of American taxpayer dollars only to become factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain.”
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He claimed the universities had replaced “the study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of wokeness and weakness.”
“This is not education, this is indoctrination,” he added.
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“The Department of War is finished subsidizing the corruption of our own in uniform class,” he said. “We’re done paying for the privilege of our enemies’ wicked ideologies to be taught to our future leaders. We’ve had enough.”
“We cannot and will not send our most capable officers, senior officers, into graduate programs that undermine the very values they have sworn to uphold.”
Hegseth added that the department would also hold itself accountable, starting with a top-to-bottom review of “our own internal war colleges, ensuring they are once again bastions of strategic thought, wholly dedicated to the singular mission of developing the most lethal and effective leaders and war fighters the world has ever known.”
